NPG Booknote
COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
New York: Viking, 2004. 575 pp. $29.95
new study of "how societies choose to fail or succeed" has received considerD r.ableDiamond's
attention, and deservedly so. He describes eight threats to traditional societies and
twelve among modern societies. He details the process by which various well-known collapses
occurred in Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, Mayan civilization, Norse
Greenland; and he touches upon others: Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete, the Harappan culture in south Asia, Angkor Wat.
He describes only three success stories in the
face of similar threats: upland New Guinea, Tokugawa Japan and Tikopia in the Pacific.
I would note (and Dr. Diamond observes in several instances) that the primary driver
of the threats was the seventh one he lists: population growth, or the settlement of places too
fragile to handle the numbers. And the success stories depended upon drastic population
limitation. Diamond makes the point that such threats are not simply history. Collapses are
occurring today, and the huge growth of populations and globalization means that a threat in
one place can threaten all of us.
This book is important as an antidote to the unthinking confidence - at least until the
present oil price scare - that our society is immune. He believes our current problems "are like
time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years", and the only way to address them is with "long term
planning and the willingness to reconsider core values" - in the U.S. case, the addiction to growth
and conspicuous consumption. Dr. Diamond's style is readable and anecdotal; the book should
be a boon for NPG members, and for their acquaintances who are open minded enough to reconsider their values.
But let Dr. Diamond speak for himself. The following pages were taken intact from the
Prologue to his book.
- Lindsey Grant
monumental ruins left behind by those
T he
past societies hold a romantic fascination
for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures.
When we grow up, many of us plan vacations
in order to experience them at firsthand as
tourists. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the
mysteries that they pose. The scales of the
ruins testify to the former wealth and power of
their builders -- they boast "Look on my
works, ye mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's
words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning
the great structures that they had created at
such effort. How could a society that was
once so mighty end up collapsing? What
were the fates of its individual citizens? -- did
they move away, and (if so) why, or did they
die there in some unpleasant way? Lurking
behind this romantic mystery is the nagging
thought: might such a fate eventually befall
our own wealthy society? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of
New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare
COLLAPSE: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed
today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya
cities?
It has long been suspected that many
of those mysterious abandonments were at
least partly triggered by ecological problems:
people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies
depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide -- ecocide -- has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent
decades by archaeologists, climatologists,
historians, paleontologists, and palynologists
(pollen scientists). The processes through
which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall
into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation
and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses),
water management problems, overhunting,
overfishing, effects of introduced species on
native species, human population growth,
and increased per capita impact of people.
Those past collapses tended to follow
somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced
people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, doublecropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto
more marginal land, in order to feed the
growing number of hungry mouths.
Unsustainable practices led to environmental
damage of one or more of the eight types just
listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal
lands having to be abandoned again.
Consequences for society included food
shortages, starvation, wars among too many
people fighting for too few resources, and
overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population
decreased through starvation, war, or disPage 2
ease, and society lost some of the political,
economic, and cultural complexity that it had
developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting
to draw analogies between those trajectories
of human societies and the trajectories of
individual human lives -- to talk of a society's
birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death
-- and to assume that the long period of
senescence that most of us traverse between
our peak years and our deaths also applies to
societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the
modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly
after reaching peak numbers and power, and
those rapid declines must have come as a
surprise and shock to their citizens. In the
worst cases of complete collapse, everybody
in the society emigrated or died. Obviously,
though, this grim trajectory is not one that all
past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways,
while many societies didn't collapse at all.
The risk of such collapses today is now
a matter of increasing concern; indeed, collapses have already materialized for
Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third
World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear
war and emerging diseases as a threat to
global civilization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight
that undermined past societies, plus four new
ones: human-caused climate change,
buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will
become globally critical within the next few
decades: either we solve the problems by
then, or the problems will undermine not just
Somalia but also First World societies. Much
more likely than a doomsday scenario involv-
COLLAPSE: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed
ing human extinction or an
apocalyptic collapse of industrial
civilization would be "just" a
future of significantly lower living
standards, chronically higher
risks, and the undermining of
what we now consider some of
our key values. Such a collapse
could assume various forms,
such as the worldwide spread of
diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of
environmental resources. If this
reasoning is correct, then our
efforts today will determine the
state of the world in which the
current generation of children
and young adults lives out their
middle and late years.
But the seriousness of
these current environmental
problems is vigorously debated.
Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they
underestimated? Does it stand
to reason that today's human
population of almost seven billion, with our potent modern
technology, is causing our environment to crumble globally at a
much more rapid rate than a
mere few million people with
stone and wooden tools already made it
crumble locally in the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating
new problems faster than it solves old ones?
When we deplete one resource (e.g., wood,
oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being
able to substitute some new resource (e.g.,
plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed
fish)? Isn't the rate of human population
growth declining, such that we're already on
course for the world's population to level off
at some manageable number of people?
All of these questions illustrate why
those famous collapses of past civilizations
have taken on more meaning than just that of
a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some
practical lessons that we could learn from all
those past collapses. We know that some
past societies collapsed while others didn't:
what made certain societies especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes
by which past societies committed ecocide?
Page 3
COLLAPSE: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed
Why did some past societies fail to see the
messes that they were getting into, and that
(one would think in retrospect) must have
been obvious? Which were the solutions that
succeeded in the past? If we could answer
these questions, we might be able to identify
which societies are now most at risk, and
what measures could best help them, without
waiting for more Somalia-like collapses.
But there are also differences between
the modern world and its problems, and those
past societies and their problems. We should
not be so naïve as to think that study of the
past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from
past societies in some respects that put us at
lower risk than them; some of those respects
often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern
societies. We also differ from past societies in
some respects that put us at greater risk than
them: mentioned in that connection are,
again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization
(such that now a collapse even in remote
Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the
dependence of millions (and, soon, billions)
of us on modern medicine for our survival,
and our much larger human population.
Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but
only if we think carefully about its lessons.
Dr. Jared Diamond was born in New York, received his doctorate from Oxford, and is
Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His book, Guns,
Germs and Steel, received the Pulitzer prize.
© 2005 NPG. Permission to reprint is granted in
advance. Please acknowledge source and
author and notify NPG.
This Booknote, as well as other NPG publications, can be found on our internet website at
http://www.npg.org.
NPG is a national membership organization
founded in 1972. Annual dues are $30 and are
tax-deductible to the extent the law allows.
Please write or call for a list of available
publications.
Page 4
About the editor: Lindsey Grant is a writer
and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Population and Environment.
Negative Population Growth, Inc.
NPG
2861 Duke Street
Suite 36
Alexandria, VA 22314
voice: 703-370-9510
fax: 703-370-9514
internet: ww.npg.org
e-mail: [email protected]